The Alliston Creamery has been in operation for almost a century. According to an old copy of The Alliston Herald, dated Jan. 9, 1919, Messrs. Hutchinson and Foster had recently constructed the concrete building on Dominion Street, just east of Church Street and they were installing their equipment that winter so that they could commence operation in the spring.

In the spring calving season, the production of milk and cream would reach its highest level. The cows would be most productive on the fresh spring pastures and the country roads would be open to facilitate delivery. Mr. Jas. Patterson had been delivering milk about town but the new creamery contracted with him for his entire milk production and they would deliver it.

Before 1919, since the first pioneers started keeping cattle here, most butter was produced on the farms by housewives and traded in the market square on market day or exchanged for other goods in the little stores about the towns and villages.

My father remembers his mother producing butter once a week using a churn which was powered by the farm dog which ran on a treadmill. Apparently the animal began to know what day he would be on duty and tried to escape the previous evening and had to be tied up.

My mother recalled spending weekends on the farm located at the corner of King Street and Victoria Street and helping her little school friend to wash milk bottles and fill them with milk produced there for town delivery by horse and wagon.

I remember our daily routine on the farm where I grew up. Every morning and evening my brother and sister and I would take up our milking stools and each sit down to milk cows.

The barn cats would line up against the stone wall and wait for us to send an occasional squirt their way. They learned to catch it very well. Sometimes I would squirt a little milk down my sister's neck just to irritate her and then a milk war would break out if our dad was not watching. A cow was apt to lose patience, however, if I stretched her poor teat too far and she might settle things with a sharp blow from a hard hoof.

After all the milk was carried to the farmhouse, it was strained into the large, round, metal bowl of the separator. Before the days of farm electricity, this machine was cranked rapidly by a hand crank, spinning the milk until the cream and the milk were separated by centrifugal force and skim milk came out of one spout and pure cream from the other. The skim milk returned to the barn for animal consumption and the cream was kept for butter production.

Many times, I helped my mother to make butter at home. We had a ceramic churn which held several gallons of cream. It was called a "dash churn" and it had a wooden plunger which had to be dashed up and down in the cream until it became solidified as the first stage of the butter process. Then it was kneaded in a giant wooden bowl with a wooden paddle until all the buttermilk was worked out of it. Some people added a little salt.

When the cows were eating dandelions in spring pasture, the product was slightly yellow. Little by little, most of the homemade butter began to disappear with the passing years. Farmers began to deliver the cream in large metal cans to the local creameries.

I remember our old neighbours, the McMahon girls driving to town several times per week by mule and buggy to deliver the cream to the Alliston Creamery. There, it would be tested to measure the quantity of butter fat, using the "Babcock Test." They would be paid according to those results. Things have changed a lot since those days but that's the way we were then.

Milk has always been very important for humans all over the world. We read in the Holy Bible that God promised to give the children of Israel, a land of "milk and honey" if they would be obedient and serve and worship Him. When they broke the agreement, He allowed it to be taken from them. That was thousands of years ago but milk is still important.

I remember the days when the Alliston folk would put an empty milk bottle on the front step with some money and early in the morning, Jimmy Prince would load up his milk wagon at the creamery and deliver milk or whipping cream to each individual house. His faithful horse knew every stop.

After 1938, Bill Bell bought out Foster and Hutchinson and he raised butter to 25 cents a pound and milk to the shocking high price of 10 cents a quart. Cream cost 35 cents a pint. Some refused to pay it and many a vacant lot had a family milk cow cutting the grass there but after a few years they got tired of the work. Few people realize the countless hours of hard work that dairy families endure, 365 days a year, night and morning, to keep the milk flowing.

Well, eventually, people began to buy their dairy products in the modern supermarket. The jingle and jangle of Jimmy's old milk wagon was heard no more and the horse went out to pasture.

The horse and buggy no longer delivered cream to Dominion Street as creamery trucks raced up and down the sideroads to haul in the cans from the farms.

ell was pretty busy in the war years supplying milk to Camp Borden and production started at 4 a.m. and finished at 10 p.m. Eventually, Mr. Bell sold his business to the Hannah Bros. and Golden Dawn butter continued to be packaged and sold here.

I remember how busy it was with truck drivers unloading cans of cream and other employees washing and sterilizing emptied cans and loading them up for another country run. There was always a lot of noise and clanging of cans that were being man handled by busy men in rubber boots and white rubber aprons. The creamery employed lots of people.

The Alliston Creamery was purchased by the Kennedy family in 1968 and at that time they produced about 600,000 pounds of butter per year. Creameries still existed in Tottenham, Orangeville, Schomberg, Caledon East, Creemore and Stayner but in the early 1970s they began to disappear.

The Kennedys bought out the Creemore and Stayner establishments and became highly mechanized and raised production to two million pounds of butter annually. This required four million pounds of cream and most of this would be collected from cheese plants and dairies.

My visit to a local dairy farm last week showed me how far modern science and today's wonderful milk producing cattle have come in quantity of production.

A computer controlled robot doles out to each cow, the quantity of high powered feed that her level of milk production requires and the milk travels directly from the cow through sterilized tubes into a large refrigerated tank where it remains until the big milk tanker truck arrives to haul it away to the dairy.

Since the rise in popularity of two per cent milk, there is a lot of cream for sale and the Kennedy family buys great quantities of it from the dairies and cheese plants. Visiting their creamery recently I saw how a relatively small staff using automatic packaging machines can churn and package more than 60 pounds of butter per minute. They've come a long way since old Mary Jane used to deliver her little can of cream by her white mule and buggy.

Our part of Ontario has been a great agricultural blessing. It produces a tremendous quantity of excellent food products, a God-given gift to us, our land of "milk and honey." Let's hope that the next generation will care for it properly and that it will never be taken from us.

Thanks to the den Haan dairy farm and the Kennedy family for information provided

For more stories about the yesteryears of Alliston see next Wednesday's edition of the Alliston Herald. Ralph Braden plans to publish a compilation these stories in a book entitled The Way We Were Then.